Henry VIII

Guilt-stricken ... Dominic Rowan as Henry VIII and Amanda Lawrence as the Fool. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

You can see why it has taken the Globe a long time to get round to reviving Henry VIII. It was this play that in 1613 sent the original building up in flames. And, as a collaborative venture between Shakespeare and Fletcher, the play lacks stylistic unity. But at least Mark Rosenblatt gives us a cogent account of this relative rarity, marred only by one or two touches of stylistic fussiness.

Rosenblatt presents the play as a straightforward Tudor political thriller about the transience of earthly power. Accordingly, his designer, Angela Davies, has added a forestage where Buckingham, Queen Katherine and Wolsey can lament their fall from grace. I am less happy about the decision to act out reported events. The play's tricky opening scene is made more, rather than less, confusing by having puppets embody the encounter of Henry and the French king at the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The modern puppet-fetish also reaches the point of absurdity with a capering Fool who lugs around a marionette supposedly embodying the king's conscience.

This is made all the more gratuitous by the fact that Dominic Rowan's Henry is one of the production's outstanding strengths. Avoiding bluff heartiness, Rowan presents us with a Henry who is both impetuous and guilt-stricken. At his first sight of Anne Boleyn, Rowan glances over his shoulder at the gallery to confide: "By heaven, she is a dainty one." Yet Rowan later displays the right nervy anxiety when he claims that doubts about the legitimacy of his marriage to Katherine shook his conscience with a "spitting power". And, even if the play is a piece of Tudor propaganda, there is a fiery decency about Rowan's monarch as he defends Archbishop Cranmer against his Catholic accusers and finally strikes what we think of as the Holbein pose.

Ian McNeice also makes an excellent heavy-jowled Wolsey, suggesting all the cardinal vices. In his downfall, he is strangely moving without losing any of Wolsey's quick-wittedness: told that Thomas More has been appointed chancellor, McNeice cries, "That's somewhat sudden" with the sharp irony of the born politico. If I was less touched by Kate Duchêne's Katherine, it was partly because she overdoes the discarded queen's vituperative anger, and partly because, in the great scene where she appeals against the annulment of her marriage, my attention was distracted by Amanda Lawrence as the superfluous Fool busily grimacing behind the throne. But that sums up the contradictions of a production that clearly lays out the play's pageantry and political infighting without fully trusting the text, or setting the Globe on fire.